Can the Madoffs Ever Be Sympathetic?

In a scene near the end of HBO Films’ docudrama The Wizard of Lies, Andrew, the youngest son of fraudster Bernie Madoff, speaks to a writing class at Princeton in 2013. A student asks him why he hasn’t tried harder to clear his name and convince the world that he knew nothing of the $65 billion Ponzi scheme that led his father to be sentenced to 150 years in jail in 2009. “I don’t know if I’m that sympathetic a character,” Andrew says. “At the end of the day, I lived a life of great wealth and privilege,” one that was subsidized by his father’s prey. “It’s hard to tell our story,” he continues, referring to himself, his brother, Mark, and their mother, Ruth. “There are just three of us, and there were thousands of victims.”

The exchange gets to the crux of the movie, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert De Niro as the fraudster: Is the toll that Madoff’s crime took on his wife and sons enough to make us feel bad for them? For decades, Ruth, Mark, and Andrew were lied to by a domineering man whose business acumen they revered. Then, after Madoff’s arrest, their finances were decimated. Ruth, who’d known Madoff since she was 13 and he was a 15-year-old lifeguard in the borough of Queens, lost the love of her life. And though the government never charged the sons or Ruth with a crime—the film makes clear the family knew nothing about the scam—the world assumed they were in on it. They were ostracized by former colleagues, neighbors, and the public. Ruth’s longtime hairdresser denied her a dye job.